Modern communication networks are growing in size and complexity. Unfortunately, as the number of consumers increase and the sophistication of services continue to evolve, the performance of these networks tend to degrade, in part, from link and pathway congestion. As such, network service providers (or carriers) enabling communications over, for instance, circuit-switched networks (such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), integrated services digital networks (ISDN), etc.) are seeking higher-quality, more performance rich, and better scaling alternatives to offload the increasing amount of user traffic from these circuit-switched networks onto, for example, packet-switched networks. This has given rise to an emergence of gateway technologies providing interfaces between circuit-switched and packet-switched networks that are capable of interworking between various transmission protocols and corresponding technologies of these networks so that intermediary transmissions can occur over at least one packet-switched network. Along with this mode of network traffic management comes a new burden to provision and ensure reliable service over converged infrastructures, i.e., service that is capable of withstanding link and node failure, as well as maintaining high transmission capacity and quality of service. In fact, the highly competitive nature of the telecommunications industry has caused network service providers to rely, more than ever, on network availability, resilience, and reliability as key differentiators to delivering voice, data, and video services. Namely, the impact of network failures (whether soft or hard), even if for a short duration, can result in substantial losses. Thus, the ability to efficiently manage, e.g., configure, monitor, evaluate, and adapt, the performance of these signaling gateways is becoming a critical business component for network service providers. Conventional approaches, however, have proven inadequate, especially across large, complex infrastructures.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can efficiently and effectively provide signaling gateway management.